Chapter 3: Project Immortality (August 1961) (Done: ~ 40 pages in storage unit G15 in Fontana,
CA among 240 boxes of books; it must be scanned in page-by-page. This document
was typed on an electric typewriter, and the font must be preserved [long before there
were PC's or the Internet] to validate its original date of origin. It was classified
"Restricted to Core" [a very small group of people, and all readers were required to
sign the cover page of their copy and return it later] but it has now been declassified.)

3.1 Biological Interventions (45 percent effort)
3.2 Bionics (45 percent effort)
3.3 Social Implications (10 percent effort)
3.3.1 The cost of intervening in aging will be prohibitive (except for the rich)
3.3.2 The population will explode if nobody dies (myth)
3.3.3 A world with a stable population but without young children or old folks
(everybody appears to be between [20 and 30] yo) will be very different than the
one we know and love today

Chapter 4: What Have We Learned about Aging Thus Far?
4.1 Aging, its clinical signs and symptoms, as revealed in human civilization or in zoos (not in
the wild) is the net effect of two antagonistic forces: (1) Growth/Reproduction; and (2)
Entropy; consistent with an open system subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics
4.2 Human Life-History Diagrams (based on 18 parameters in a triple-linear spline function)
4.3 The biology of Supercentenarians: GRG Table E and Conclusions of 11 Autopsies
4.4 Average Life Expectancy continues to increase monotonically and systematically due to
public health and obstetrical interventions, but Maximum Lifespan continues to remain at
the Guinness Book of World Records Calment Limit (122 yo); we do not expect
this record to be broken in our lifetimes.
4.5 The age of onset of age-related diseases appears to be highly predictable and not
stochastic; explaining why a methylation algorithm predicts chronological age better than
tree rings (dendrochronology)

Chapter 5: What Can We Do about Aging, If Anything? Quote: "... customizing human stem cells to regenerate a damaged, old, or sick body ...
rejuvenating worn-out muscles, and so on." - - J. Craig Venter, Ph.D. at the bottom of p. 158 of
his latest book, Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital
Life (Viking, New York; 2013); however, at UCLA on February 30, 2014 during a one-hour
talk, he was silent on this matter except to say that stem-cell lines have been shown to be filled
with mutations and they won't be good for therapy as they stand today.

5.1 We can't do anything about the weak force of entropy; that lives everywhere in
the universe, and there's no escape from the laws of physics; but we could do something
about the strong force of growth/fitness by modifying or debugging the
embryogenic/developmental software program distributed within our DNA, so as to keep
the force of entropy at bay, i.e., tilted in favor of fitness
5.2 Monthly infusions of ~1 million pristine autologous iPSC's i iv under medical supervision
without obliterating normal tissue architecture (or creating cancer as part of the therapy)
5.3 Neurodegenerative Diseases (AD, PD, ALS, FTD)
5.3 Facilitating the Bridge Plan leading us to a Technological Singularity (~2038)

Epilogue (Prioritizing Our Efforts with Annual Two-Day Conferences)

At the conferences, we should conduct formal debates one-on-one, but supervised by others, that
would allow us to critique the personal Vision Statement for how you would solve (or cure) the
problem of aging. In particular, a Vision Statement would involve at least four components:

1. A partitioning or decomposition of the problem into separable components that are
mutually-excusive but jointly-exhaustive, using the well-known scientific methodology of
"recursive reductionism." In engineering jargon, this is referred to as "trouble shooting." In the
world of software development, this approach is called "debugging." Note that I was in the room
ten years ago when Dr. Aubrey de Grey first announced his own decomposition, called the SENS
Plan, which I largely endorse and is no longer as controversial as it once was.

2. A proposed metric that we could use to estimate the distance by which we have not-yet
solved the problem. This heuristic is sometimes referred to as "Means/Ends Analysis" or "Hill
Climbing" in AI circles. It falls under Cybernetics in Systems Control Theory circles.
We would apply the metric recursively to all the subcomponents.

3. A date certain when we can all expect a solution to the problem that will lead to FDA-
approved clinical trials to slow and/or reverse human aging and senescence in our lifetimes. This
is also the problem of when Ray Kurzweil's Technological Singularity will emerge?

4. A failure of critics to produce persuasive/compelling counter arguments or a full
refutation. In legal language, lawyers would say "your case is 'without merit' ... because my
client doesn't own a dog." in the case of a dog-biting lawsuit. This must be ascertained by a group
of independent reviewers for whom all parties were agreed in advance.

Acknowledgements

Appendices:

A.1 References
A.2 Glossary (See the GRG website)
A.3 Important Scientific Historical Players (see the Resources Section of the GRG website)
A.4 Time Line for Research on Longevity
A4M: Coles, "There is no such thing as anti-aging medicine." (date)
AMMG: We need evidence-based age management medicine (date)
Both organizations are still actively functioning
A.5 Resume for L. Stephen Coles
A.6 Suggested Curriculum for an undergraduate degree in Gerontology
A.7 GRG Speakers and Abstracts [1990 - 2014] (See GRG Meetings Section)
A.8 GRG Discussion Group ~500 people contribute [5 - 10] messages a day seven days a week
A.9 PowerPoint Slides (263 slides formatted six per page, minus the autopsy slides that are only
intended for physician audiences)
A.10 Ten Home Work Problems (with answers) for students
A.11 Updates to Supercentenarian Tables Can Be Found on the GRG.ORG website
A.12 Related websites:
a. SupercentenarianResearchFoundation.org maintained by Stanley Primmer
b. A sister website (with commercial interests): bridgeplan.org maintained by Bobbie Brooke
c. Connectome

INDEX

Contingency: In the event of my demise due to Stage-IV pancreatic cancer
metastasized to the liver, before publication, I authorize James Watson and Steven Harris to
obtain an Editor and get it published by a respectable publishing house at their earliest
convenience.

DEDICATION
To Natalie, Electra, and Cailyn

PREFACE

It is often said that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It is the purpose
of this book to provide at least a portion of evidence needed to support the claim that "biological
immortality" will become feasible in the lifetimes of many of those now reading this text. The
claim that current humans would seek to replace themselves with "immortal equivalents" is
certainly an extraordinary claim. To find the evidence needed, we must embrace all of
human cultural knowledge to gain the perspective that will make intelligible the flurry of
newspaper headlines that we read every day, regarding science, technology, and medicine, that
deal with what happened if the last few moments of our history and rarely if ever discuss what
could happen but hasn't happened yet. And that's why I have chosen to redefine
Genesis, the first chapter of the Hebrew/Christian Bible, as the first chapter of this book. But
first, permit me a short explanation about how I came to this conclusion.

In 1967, while I was a graduate student at Carnegie Institute of Technology (soon to become
Carnegie Mellon University [CMU]) in Pittsburgh, PA, my mentor then at the Andrus
Gerontology Center at USC's main campus in Los Angeles, CA, Prof. Bernard L. Strehler, Ph.D.
[19xx - 2000] (he didn't get an M.D. although he started the program at Johns Hopkins in
Baltimore, MD) and author of Time, Cells, and Aging [1] that had just come out in
paperback, advised me "Steve, you have good genes. Why don't you reproduce and create some
progeny for the future?" And so I did, having just gotten married that year. He then advised me
to change my religion from Methodist to Unitarian Universalist. And so I did, since his
arguments were compelling. Strehler and I argued at length about the significant change in tone
in the first chapter of the hard-copy version and the paperback version of his seminal book. The
original was very establishmentarian, while the paper-back version was much more optimistic
regarding the potential for anti-aging interventions. He told me, "Steve, you were the first person
to notice this shift in tone." After that, we became fast friends and I visited him at his home in
the San Fernando Valley and he reciprocated by giving a talk to my AI Group at Stanford
Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA. Finally, he advised, "Stop working on all this Artificial
Intelligence computer stuff (my thesis work on Computational Linguistics under Richard King
Mellon Endowed Chair Professor of Psychology and Computer Science Herbert A. Simon, Ph.D.
[19xx - 19yy], who subsequently went on to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for work he did at
the University of Chicago long before I knew him). I didn't follow Strehler's advice on this one
(at least at that time). What he said was as follows:
There are only two intellectually difficult problems worthy of anyone's attention...
1. How does the brain work? and
2. Why do we get old and die?

This was typical Strehler speaking, both presumptuous and arrogant, given all the other
challenging and interesting problems that one could potentially work on.

For Strehler, the first problem was really "Where in the architecture of the brain could one
locate consciousness or personhood?" He went on to build several hardware
prototypes of neural networks in his living room in St. Pedro, overlooking the Pacific Ocean that
he subsequently patented based on his idea of codon-encryption of transmission of axonal action
potentials toward the distal synapses. We will need to do comparative anatomy of different
primates to help us solve this problem with a strong focus on Broca's Area (language/speech)
and solve the Connectome Problem.

The statement of the second problem should be revised to ask "How?" not "Why?"
we get old and die. [We already know the answer to the Why? question... It's because our DNA
runs out of things to do once we have fulfilled our Prime Directive to "Go forth and multiply."]
Furthermore, to be precise the "How" answer must contain actionable items that suggest
interventions/therapies, especially ones that could be tested in our lifetimes. Starting in 1975,
when I left SRI and went to medical school, I went to work on, not one, but both of these
problems, for the rest of my professional life. I now teach Neurophysiology to graduate students
and Gerontology to undergraduates at UCLA.

Both of Strehler's problems are super hard (characterized in DARPA language as "Grand
Challenge" problems), even 47 years later. The BRAIN initiative announced by President
Obama in his 2013 State of the Union Address will help us make progress on the first problem.
But we don't have anything comparable for Problem 2 yet. Our Group is trying as best we can to
get the President's attention through the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP). However, we are not authorized to speak more about this until granted permission,
given that this a more politically sensitive area for the Executive Branch to spend substantial
money on (>$100 million), given the culture we live in. It is likely that some US Congressmen or
Senators would object, in principle, to the desirability of even working on this problem, despite
the fact that partial success could lead to substantial savings for our health-care budget as
demonstrated in a number of new econometric reports that relate the dollar-for-dollar investment
to a big multiple return on investment [2].

Finally, there is no reason in principle to believe that neither of the these problems couldn't
be solved sooner or later, given that their solutions wouldn't violate the laws of physics,
chemistry, or biology.

INTRODUCTION

There is a wide spectrum of opinion among human beings about the desirability of life and
death. Regarding life, however, it's well known that pronatalism is the
dominant philosophy. The US Government, as well as most other formal governments, provide
incentives in the form of income-tax exemptions to create more children, not to mention
legislation that promotes the agenda of ProLife (anti-abortion) politics, despite the exponentially
exploding human population that contaminates the surface of our planet without any rational
basis. I don't believe that there is any biologist who believes that we are currently in danger
species' extinction as we once were, say 50 thousand years ago, when "The Force" was not on our
side, and we were surrounded by nasty predators who would eat us for lunch if given the slightest
opportunity and the potential for warfare with other primates over scarce resources.

Regarding death, the consensus is more mixed. One can distinguish a spectrum
whose poles are represented by the following two quotes:

1. "Death is an imposition on the human race, and is no longer acceptable." - - Alan Harrington
[1918 - 1978] The Immortalist: An Approach to Engineering Man's Divinity
(1969)[3]

2. "The finitude of Life is a blessing, whether we know it or not." - - Prof. Leon Kass, M.D.,
Ph.D., University of Chicago and first Director of President Bush's Biomedical Ethics Council.
(2000)[4]

So where does the average person lie along this spectrum of intervention vs. maintaining the
status quo? The Pew Charitable Trust conducted a poll with a lengthy questionnaire of ["n"]
random people that asked them to help us find out. It turns out that average people have a very
sensible attitude toward death. They typically say, "I don't want to live forever, even if I could."
[x] percent of those polled. That's because every rational person knows that anyone who
manifests symptoms of aging and senescence past the age of 60, no matter what their life style, is
doomed to incur further chronic diseases in an irreversible, combinatorial manner until they
perish from this Earth (sometimes referred to as eternal obliteration, unless of course, as
many of faith would prefer to believe, they wind up in Heaven where they can consult with other
of their relatives who preceded them). Along the way, old folk often suffer increasing frailty and
pain until they die of what are called "natural causes," despite the best medical care that our
society has to offer. And this is true whether you view aging as a natural process or a disease of
its own, for which there is a systematic increase in age-related diseases. This phenomenon is
clearly proportional to chronological age, as all life insurance companies know well. Actuaries
take your age, gender, race, geographical location, and smoking history into account from which
they can calculate your premiums for a 10-year, $100,000 term policy and never fail to make
money for their company without ever having to examine your medial/surgical history or perform
any physical exams or laboratory testing, although many Internet longevity calculator algorithms
require these inputs as though they were important. They may be important for the individual,
but they're not statistically important for the insurance company.

Average life expectancy has been rising monotonically for centuries secondary to the low-
hanging fruit of simple public health measures for the separation of water and sewage, but
especially in the last century secondary to childhood vaccines, antibiotics, anesthesia for C-
sections, car- and home-accident prevention, and blood type and cross-match {A, B, AB, O} for
transfusions, as needed. Nevertheless, maximum human lifespan has not advanced one iota
following the death of French supercentenarian, Madam Jeanne-Louis Calment who died at the
age of 122 back in 1997. In fact, it's not even a "horse race," since nobody has come even close
to her Guinness Book of World Records outlier status. And we should know, since the
GRG consults for Guinness in the category of Longevity, and we have maintained the list of the
oldest living validated people in the world for more than 15 years with help of an international
team of 40 collaborators (Table E on the GRG.ORG website) as now recognized by Wikipedia,
Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CNN-TV as the world authority on this topic, due to
our rigorous standards for inclusion and our precise method of weeding out pretenders or
detecting exaggerated claims. By the way, we were not here to validate the claims of our
antediluvian patriarks in Genesis from Adam to Noah, including Noah's Grandfather,
Methuselah who was alleged to have died at the record age of 969.

So why is that? One would imagine that with the base of the population pyramid expanding
exponentially, the apex should also be rising, but it's not! Is there some law of biological
mortality that functions as a fundamental limit on longevity (what we have chosen to call the
"Calment Limit" that will not likely be broken in our lifetimes). Probably not. But there is
something in our genome that is shutting our fitness down leading to increasing frailty when our
DNA runs out of things to do, particularly the non-coding portion (what used to be called "junk
DNA, before we knew better) . When the Darwinian Force of Evolution ceases to operate on an
individual's longevity phenotype, the force of entropy (and without the correct number of Tana
Leaves) takes charge (tilts in its favor), and we sink into a muck of pure protoplasm (to be
consumed by our friendly microbiome), as prisoners of a decrepit body that ceases to obey our
commands, even if our brains are still functional and our minds are not yet senile.

Ordinary people know that our good men (and women) in white coats (physicians who have
undergone a decade or more of training and have more decades of clinical practice) are not
magicians. No one routinely performs miracles (except for charlatans and homeopaths) when
patients get really, really old. Nobody would want to suffer at the end of their lives in chronic
pain while on a ventilator and they can hardly move, let alone know what's going on in the
outside world around them (hence the medical chart designation DNR [Do Not Resuscitate]). No
one wants to be permanently confined to bed or a wheel chair or become simultaneously blind
and/or deaf. Furthermore, no one would want to swap places with the average supercentenarian
that we have visited in person (See the 100's of supercentenarian photos in the gallery of the
Supercentenarian Section of our GRG.ORG website.) I don't know if there's a term for "Put me
in a medically-induced coma for the next 20 years until somebody figures how to fix/repair/cure
what's wrong with me," but in the mean time, keep me well hydrated with proper nutrition,
prevent muscle-wasting (sarcopenia), and avoid the onset of skin lesions due to pressure sores
(decubitus ulcers). This challenge is essentially beyond the state of the art, except for those in a
Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) or an ordinary deep coma.

Average people would prefer to die in the middle of the night in their sleep. This assumes
that their remaining family (loved ones) have access to your Last Will and Testament (the
decedent), life insurance policies, the data to create an Obituary if your passing were to attract
media attention by a newspaper reporter or two, and your wishes for burial/cremation and funeral
services (open casket or closed, etc.). There may be other things that your survivors may need to
protect your legacy against malicious gossip in a tabloid newspaper.

Therefore, if we were to "fast reverse" a non-existent video tape by a 100,000 years to the
time of our (illiterate) ancestors and attempt to reconstruct their "magical thinking regarding
death, they probably realized that they were special (the only group of tribal primates who
appreciated that no matter what they did, they would die if they managed to live long enough).
This is something that present-day theologians euphemistically call "The Human Condition." As
much as they may have wished to continue living, we speculate that they recognized this
relentless inevitability about death, and they had to resign themselves to that reality by
constructing rituals around it. By the way, even though average life expectancy was around 20
years during these prehistoric paleolithic times, there were plenty of people who lived into their
50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's. These folk became the tribal elders who passed on knowledge of
survival techniques (designing and using tools and weapons, like spears, not clubs, how to hunt
as a team, how to build a fire to stay warm in Winter and/or cook raw meat to make it more
digestible/palatable, and most importantly where to move next when a particular location was
hunted out). This is consistent with the idea that our H. sapiens species nearly became extinct
several times, as did our competitors The Neanderthals (despite some mild inbreeding) some
15,000 years ago, probably due to numerous wars over scarce resources and/or adverse
environmental effects, such as plague/pestilence, drought, floods, and so on (i.e., the four
horsemen of the apocalypse). Maybe 30,000 years ago, humans domesticated wolves into a new
breed of canines. These hounds were helpful for our joint survival, not as pets per se, but as
guard dogs and hunters. They woke us up when a pack of wild animals entered our caves during
the night with aim of eating us alive.

Though humans must have made the empirical observation that death was inevitable, they
surely made a large number of herbal and other interventions, but to no avail. Death was a
standard, universal event whose occurrence was directly proportional to chronological age. They
must have also made the observation around this time that there was a cause-and-effect relation
between copulation with females and their subsequent pregnancy nine months later. This
probably led to the idea of marriage ceremonies and monogamy (although polygamy may have
preceded) rather than random copulation), since that way, fathers of a defined family unit
increased the likelihood that their first-born sons would stay around to protect them when they
got old. In exchange, the father (and mother) could take on the role of grandparenting while the
parents were preoccupied with the essential function of hunter/gathering. This idea recurs in
more modern times under the rubric of "primogeniture" in which any land assets or real estate
that you inherited from your own father for the purpose of agriculture (for which you have legal
title or ownership) or those that you may have accumulated during your own lifetime would
become available to your first-born son upon your death. This likely led to the idea of a "Will"
that named your sons as Executors ... "Being of sound mind and in the presence of these witness,
I hereby bequeath the following..." Remember the seemingly contradictory Shakespearian quote,
"The King is dead, long live the King."

This presages "thanatology" or what to do about the dead once they have expired. (At
UCLA we have an "Office of Decedent Affairs" hidden in the Anatomical Pathology Section of
the David Geffen School of Medicine.)

The first thing to do is to recognize that "doing nothing" doesn't work well (especially in the
absence of refrigeration). A rotten corpse quickly starts to stink. So we have to invent a new
industry of mortuary sciences: (1) Bury the corpse six feet under in a special location called a
"cemetery," and then hire a stone mason to carve a head stone, so that you can revisit your dearly
departed at a future time with flowers. For this purpose, it would have been valuable to have
already invented money (in the form of coins) to allow economic transactions that could be
recorded in a written form (hence the invention of writing). If you were sufficiently wealthy, you
could even build a family mausoleum on the same property. The alleged sacredness of human
body tissues by religious authorities prevented the dissection of dead bodies or routine autopsies
for teaching doctors the cause(s) of death for a period of many centuries. If you were poor, you
might place the bones of your relative in a stone ossuary box, which would consume
considerably less real estate, a practice common at ~0 AD; or (2) Cremation evolved in parallel if
real estate were really scarce. The Greek practice of placing two coins under the eye-lids before
lighting the pyle, so that the departed could pay the boat man to help them cross to the opposite
shore of the River Styx, a curious variation on the mythology of the time, but hardly different
from Egyptian mummification of people and cats. Remember that Aristotle believed that the
convolutions in the brain served the function of cooling the blood that was first created in heart
and magically disappeared at the extremities. This is not an unreasonable hypothesis for a
philosopher sitting at his arm chair, but Aristotle was the first zoologist and the first botanist, not
just the first logician, so we had a right to expect more. The scientific method of empirical
observation followed by rejection of inconsistent hypotheses did not become standard until
Galileo's time, many centuries later.

The second thing to do is to invent religion (pantheism), as a means to explain why we were
inflicted with death in the first place (original sin). (There are creation myths in every culture
[x].) Otherwise, we might look foolish in the eyes of our curious children. Prof. Richard
Dawkins "Theory of Agency" explains beautifully how the idea of gods (polytheism) and then
one God (Monotheism) evolved fit the bill [x]. First, we need a sacred set of fables (a bible).
Next, we would need to create a place for the gods to live (Mt. Olympus, Heaven, Paradise), so
that they can their conduct business, which includes sticking their noses in our affairs with
miracles, rainbows, and so forth. Next, we need to build churches, cathedrals, synagogues, and
mosques, so ordinary folk have a place to go at least once a week (the Sabbath) to discover God's
intentions and other arcane divine wisdom. Finally, we need to train a group of clergy, folk who
can serve as interlocutors, so they can teach the ordinary illiterate masses who don't speak or
read Latin what God wants them to do (messiahs, prophets, saints, popes, cardinals, bishops,
priests, nuns, ministers, deacons, vicars, rabbis, imams, etc.). Although Western civilization
is normally thought to begin with Greeks, the Egyptians before them had very clear ideas about
how their citizens should lead the good life, so as to be eligible for making it to their idea of
heaven. Their Kings (Pharaohs), however, caused an entire civilization to willingly participate in
their shared fantasy for several millennia at the time of the construction of the pyramids, the
tombs at Thebes, and advanced mummification techniques that included a tool to extract the
brain from the skull through the nose and throwing the brain tissue away lest it contaminate the
rest of the corpse. The brain was hardly important compared with the heart that was carefully
preserved in a jar sealed with paraphin and placed next to the sarcophricus. All this was done
without the slightest idea of critical thinking. How come the Egyptian physicians never had
examples of brain-injury survivors (with hemorrhagic strokes with contralateral paralysis) who
could then have yielded information about how the brain really functioned? (Sigh!)

The next thing to do is to encourage art consistent with local religious beliefs. So, we get
liturgical painting, sculpture (gargoyles), instrumental and choral music, songs, hymns, dance,
poetry, theater, and literature. In particular, we need writers of "just so" stories that serve to warn
us against interfering (or tampering) with the natural order (since the clergy already own this
turf). We prefer to describe those writers who compose cautionary tales as apologists for the
status quo.

Another thing to do while you're at it, is to create distractions for the masses, so that they
don't spend a lot of time perseverating over the unpleasant idea of their own mortality. A good
bet might be sports (Olympic Games, soccer (football), American-style football, basketball,
baseball, ice hockey, lacrosse, rugby, cricket, tennis, golf, boxing, wrestling, karate, archery,
bowling, squash, volley ball, badminton, ping-pong, hand ball, polo, snow skiing, ice skating,
etc. (If you lived in Rome at the time, a visit to the Coliseum might be in order to watch
gladiators kill each other). In addition to professional sports you might want to include casino
gambling, which distracts a significant proportion of the population (slot machines, dice [craps],
roulette, baccarat, poker, 21, horse racing, sports-book, etc.). Other forms of entertainment
include drinking at a bar until dead drunk, after which you get kicked out by the rules of the
establishment, lest you get a DUI while driving home. Clubbing, dancing till dawn. Attending
rock concerts. Getting high on street drugs. And so on. Don't forget IMAX movies with Dolby
Surround Sound, HD TV, radio, and tabloid newspapers and magazines with the latest celebrity
gossip, cooking, hunting, fishing, whale watching, etc.

For all of the items mentioned above to play well together in our culture, we need something
called "multiple lock-in phenomena." This phenomenon explains why when you flip a coin and
decide to drive on right of a two-lane road, that your steering wheel winds up on the left.
Conversely, if you chose to drive on the left, your steering wheel winds up on the right. Mutatis
mutandis for traffic signals and road signs. Our attitude toward our discovery of mortality is at a
very high level, like the coin flip. It dictates many of our decisions in our world view thousands
of years later. After the dominos have settled, it would be extremely difficult without a rigorous
legal separation of church and state, to prevent an absolutist evangelical religious order from
taking over your life and creating a governmental theocracy (like those that will stone you to
death or burn you at the stake for apostasy). Each religion treats the problem of theodicy
differently. Many are fatalistic; no matter what happens your destiny is sealed. Others assume
that if things go wrong, it must be your fault, and this is God's way of punishing you. Not all
religious orders profess compassion as does Buddhism. Some will send you to Hell for
disobedience, while others will send you Paradise with ~40 virgins for committing a suicide
bombing against the evil infidels.

So we wind up with society that is controlled by a complex web of presuppositions that
aging is a relentless, inevitable process that terminates in our death. Furthermore, we must avoid
thinking about it, except for an occasional visit to a funeral home and cemetery when somebody
we know actually dies.

But what if this rationalization were wrong? What if a more correct model were one of "no
interventions in aging are possible yet."? The status quo argument would be, "If man
were meant to fly, God would have given him wings." or a warning around the year 1900 that
"No heavier than air machine could ever fly." Yet a century later in 2000, our children take this
extraordinary accomplishment for granted. How could the American bicycle makers (the Wright
Brothers) at Kitty Hawk, NC have failed? Well Virginia, they failed for several days in a row
until the wind conditions were just right. Indeed, visionaries in many countries hoped to imitate
the seemingly effortless ability of birds to fly for hundreds of years without success, starting with
Leonardo's amazing engineering design for a helicopter. Indeed, today's first-class passengers
expect to fly anywhere in the world regardless of weather conditions in shirt-sleeve comfort
while sipping champagne and watching a movie.

Sometime around 1970, we landed on the moon, but for whatever reasons we lost our
momentum, and Mars still eludes us. It's not because NASA lacked the competence or the nerve.
Many of us at CalTech/JPL in Pasadena - - where I worked at the time - - prepared detailed
proposals for how to go to Mars and return safely to Earth. It seems that the US is still too
self-involved in various budget battles to finance the three-year round trip for a team of four
astronauts to set up shop on the surface for six months. They might return with the sad news
that, although their visit was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, the Red Planet is essentially
uninhabitable by ordinary folk. But so what? There will always be new challenges for daring
explorers. Biologists should begin by making serious and credible claims that for ordinary
citizens extreme lifespan as well as healthspan is not only possible, but inevitable. It's only a
matter a major influx of research funding and resources into longevity research as to how soon it
happens.

Chapter 1 - - Genesis Revised (See Charter Section of GRG.ORG)

Chapter 2 - - History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Even if I took a year off to write this chapter from scratch, I doubt that I could improve
on the existing literature on this topic. All you have to do is to walk into any major naional-chain
bookstore like Barnes and Nobel and you will find a collection of similar books...

Here are some examples:
1. Timeline of the History of Science and Technology by Isaac Asimov.
2. Medical History with an alpha for "a" in medical.
3. Watson, Ph.D. Double Helix 1969 and 2006 (Vintage Books; Random House; New York)
4. COSMOS on Fox-TV
5. Alan Lightman, The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th Century Science.

Nevertheless, I would like to explore my personal journey in terms of who influenced my
thinking about human discovery and invention in approximately chronological order:

1. Promethian Phase [2 - 1] MYA (millions of years ago) Control of fire for both warmth in
Winter and light in the darkness. Darkness must have been a particularly frightening time for
humans when we arrived on the sounds about 200 KYA, since that's when packs of wild
nocturnal carnivorous predators roamed the same territory, such as wolves or hiennas (not the
laughing type). Hiennas, by the way, have very sharp teeth and a pack of hiennas can take down
much larger animals, even isolated lions or elephants. It is likely that isolated humans were no
exception, and that's why humans who did survive probably lived in tribes.

2. Tower of Babel Phase (Linguistic Competence [200 - 100] KYA and not just cries, grunts, or
clicks). Teaching somebody how to manufacture spears and then how to throw them in the
context of hunting where the target is profoundly unwilling to stand still while you threw it
would not be trivial even in the context of abstract spoken language and almost impossible
without it. Written language would come much later when the accounts arrived.

6. Eve (inventor of fire for cooking raw meat, so as to make their calories contained in meat more
digestible).

A Brief History of Western Civilization

Remembering the problem of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, a complete understanding is very
important, while a partial understanding is perilous.

If you read three major national newspapers such as The Los Angeles Times, The New
York Times, or The Wall Street Journal, as I do, cover-to-cover every day for a
week, you will have consumed more information than an average 17th-Century citizen would
have in an entire lifetime! That's a lot of (digital) data, but it's nothing compared to what is on
the immediate horizon. By comparison, from the beginnings of civilization ~10,000 years ago to
the year 2003, all of humankind generated a grand total of 5 EB (Exa Bytes) of digital
information. An Exa Byte is one quintillion Bytes or 1,000,000,000 GB (that's 1 followed by 18
zeros). But from 2003 through 2010, we created 5 EB of digital information every two days. By
next year (2013), we will be producing 5 EB every 10 minutes. How much information is this?
The 2010 total of 912 EB is the equivalent of 18x the amount of information contained in all the
books ever written [on paper, parchment, or stone tablets]. This means that the world is not just
changing quantitatively, it's changing qualitatively. The change is not just accelerating -- the rate
of the acceleration of change is itself accelerating! [1]

Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You
Think(2012).

If Moore's Law holds true for the next 20 years, as I expect it will (the cost of computing
comes down systematically as the density of electronic circuits increases exponentially every 18
months) then the cost of a CPU chip with sensor(s) and telemetry circuits will cost less than
US$1.00. That means that every single car, appliance, piece of furniture, and even
clothing/shoes in your home will be "intelligent" (connected to the cloud [Internet] with a fully
recorded life history of everything that has ever happened to it since it was manufactured in a
factory), as it will be cheap enough and trivial to do so. The implications of this new world with
an audit trail of everything that happens and ubiquitous personal home robots everywhere will be
hard to comprehend. But let's try.

Maps Are Key to Knowledge

A historical map of the world as of 450 BCE was shown by Herodotus, the first true
historian...
This world map in its day was quite accurate. But not all historical maps were so accurate. For
example, the "Island of California" refers to a long-held European misconception, dating from
the 16th century, that California was not part of mainland North America but rather a large island
separated from the continent by a strait now known instead as the "Gulf of California." As stated
in Wikipedia, one of the most famous cartographic errors in history was propagated on
many maps during the 17th- and 18th-Centuries, despite contradictory evidence from various
explorers. The legend was initially infused with the idea that California was a terrestrial paradise,
like the Garden of Eden or Atlantis.

It was a shame that none of the indiginous (illiterate) Carribean Indians that Christopher
Columbus met on his various voyages had a map or their neighboring islands. So, as a result,
Columbus never set foot on Mexico (or anywhere on North America) during his lifetime.

I. Nine Cultural Revolutions in the Self-Image of Human Beings

Over the past 2,500 years, eight revolutions in our self-image have helped us mature or
evolve from troglodytes into rational, literate human beings. Because the Mayan Calender
stopped abruptly in the year 2012, this led some to believe that this year should be considered the
predicted end-of-the-world (the apocalypse). Many still suffer from "magical thinking." One
can distinguish at least seven major revolutions in man's self image over the last three thousand
years.

1. The Aristotelean Revolution

The world is a very large spheroid, not, according to an ancient Hindu Myth, a flat plate
held up by a turtle and four elephants:

2. The Copernican Revolution (Nicholas Copernicus; a Heliocentric Model; not a Ptolmeic
Model)

The Earth spins on its own axis and revolves around the Sun (along with other planets).
Galileo helped to prove this empirically with his invention of the telescope.

All animals and plants, including humans, descend from a common ancestor by means of
a simple evolutionary mechanism called "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest."

5. The Pasteur Revolution (Louis Pasteur, Koch, and Jenner)

The Germ Theory of Disease. Bugs cause infection, not sin, as the Catholic Church once had
us believe. Disease-causing pathogens are microbes (viruses, bacteria, fungi, rickettsia,
helminthes, and other assorted parasites).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may someday be achieved by simulating human
problem-solving processes on a computer (Expert Systems) (Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy:
The jury is still out; Chess [IBM's Deep Blue] doesn't support this hypothesis; neither
does "Watson" an IBM computer in the TV game show Jeopardy)(Robots: Isaac Asimov's Three
Laws of Robotics and the problem of a disembodied intelligence [The Imitation Game and
{Turing Test}; The Krell in Forbidden Planet]).

8. The Watsonian Revolution (James Watson of Watson and Crick)(2000)

With the sequencing of the human genome, we can now start to read the "Book of Life"
(Francis Collins, J. Craig Venter, Eric Lander, and Leroy Hood). Synthetic Biology will be the
major application of this knowledge that will someday lead to a cure for all chronic diseases,
possibly through stem-cell therapy.

9. The Hawking Revolution (Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse)(2010)

There are many parallel universes constantly being spawned with their own Big Bangs;
most do not support galaxies or light given the variable amounts of dark energy/matter in empty
space. See Brian Greene on The Fabric of the Cosmos.

II. 50 Key Events in the History of Human Civilization

A. The Stone Age

1. Death. The discovery that aging occurs relentlessly for all members of one's tribe (and, by
extension, the frightening contemplation of one's own demise). As a corollary, this
incomprehensible prospect leads to the invention of religion [immortal god(s) who "made it so"
that we shall perish, while they themselves don't die; and furthermore, they didn't bother to ask
for our consent, except for providing us with a Prime Directive to "Go forth and multiply."]
Respectful funeral ceremonies for burying the dead with things they cared about in life are
established (otherwise, corpses begin to smell like putrid meat). Cannibalism is generally
rejected as a survival strategy.

2. The ability to distinguish individuals of the same kind from another tribe who are friends
and not foes. As a corollary, trading for food and trinkets is recognized as an acceptable survival
strategy. Knowledge of the location of water becomes valuable during times of drought.

3. The invention of complex spoken language, to include "story telling" and a variety of
Genesis myths to teach children who we are and where we came from.

5. The discovery of fire and how to control it and use it for (1) heat [to keep warm in winter;
(2) light to see in a dark cave [torches]; and (3) the cooking of raw meat [to increase the
efficiency of protein absorption]. As a corollary, a gender-specific division of labor between
males (hunters) and females (gatherers/cooks) increases the survival-prospects of the tribe.
Distinguishing edible plants/nuts vs. poisonous plants {mushrooms} and medicinal herbs
become important for women. Long before Homo sapiens (200 KYA), Homo
erectus did some open fire cooking in caves 1.7 MYA in what is now called SOUTH
AFRICA.

6. The invention of clothing sewn from hides using needle-and-thread to keep warm in
winter and shoes to facilitate walking over long distances.

7. The discovery of a cause-and-effect relationship between fornication (sexual intercourse)
and procreation (birth of a baby) [intercourse and birth are separated in time by approximately
nine months]. As a corollary, the concept of a monogamous/polygamous family is established
within the tribe with words for mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, niece,
nephew [and by extension words for husband, wife, parent, child, grandparent, grandchild,
sibling, ancestor, etc.] are incorporated into the native language. The notion of primogenitor is
fashioned -- inheritance by the fist-born son of a married couple. The creation of professions:
tribal elders/leaders, lawyers/judges (to resolve disputes), witch doctors, priests, midwives,
fortune-tellers, soldiers/warriors.

8. The creation of music and instruments to play it; composers and musicians to play music.

10. The creation of cave drawings (art) as a way to teach group-hunting to children as a
survival strategy.

11. Canine breeding [wolves are domesticated and become dogs after ~10 generations; they
are further specialized as hunting dogs (blood hounds and sight hounds) and low-maintenance
security dogs (barking to wake you up in the event of danger, so you can sleep soundly without
fear of being eaten by a predator during the night.]

21. Writing (literacy, scribes, ink, papyrus, chiseling of stone tablets, head stones in a
cemetery, an arithmetical number system for counting and settling debts); libraries of scrolls and
illuminated manuscripts in monasteries … bound books; the printing press and movable type.

22. Maps (the Aztecs and Mayans didn't invent them [sigh]).

23. Mathematics (geometry; trigonometry; algebra; the digit zero as a place holder).

41. Airplanes (Wright Brothers; Boeing 747; Concord). 200 years ago powered,
heavier-than-air flight was thought to be an impossibility; 100 years ago, the Wright Brothers
gave us a prototype (proof of concept with the correct wind conditions); 50 years ago, aircraft
became indispensable.

50. Artificial Intelligence (Deep Blue for Chess; Watson for Jeopardy … Watson for each
person; Industrial Robots, Personal Household Robots [General Factotum]). Automatic
simultaneous translation of foreign languages to and from English. Herbert Simon, Allen Newell,
Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Arthur Samuel. Soon, teleprompters will no longer needed, as
all text will be displayed in real time on your contact lenses. At a medical workstation in your
bathroom, an AI Med System will analyze samples of your breath and bodily fluids {blood, tears,
sweat, saliva, urine, and feces} along with your vital signs {temp, RR, Pulse, BP, EKG} in real
time and provide you with immediate feedback on any significant change in your health status.

F. Thirty Years in the Future

51. The Singularity (Ray Kurzweil, based on Moore's Law)

52. Biological Immortality.

G. The Systematic North-Western Trajectory of Modern Civilization {excluding China}

Switak explains that "all life forms on the Earth have not progressed through evolution to
end up with Homo sapiens becoming the highest such life form; rather, evolution has
produced a wildly branching tree of life' with no predetermined path or endpoint."

A good conservationist should not strive to maintain an ecological balance' among species;
Nature has no such need. A jungle is not a zoo. Conservations would only meddle if they tried
to establish their own personal notion of a balance. If Nature could, she would merely laugh at
our conceited attempt at stewardship over the fiction of a pristine wilderness'.

1. DNA; our human genome (3.1 Giga Base Pairs; ~25 K genes)(speciation took place 200
KYA [thousand years ago] with mutations for a large brain [Broca's Area and Wernike's Areas]
and an adipose thumb that gave rise to language and tool using, respectively [fire for warmth and
cooking of meat, clothing]. Weapons for hunting in ancestral hunter/gatherer stage.

2. Epigenetics (scattered methyl groups on DNA and acetyl groups on histones, which are
influenced by the environment, determine gene expression)(identical twins reared apart have
greater phenotypic divergence over time more than identical [congenic] twins reared together).

3. The human Immune System (the ability to distinguish self from non-self at the tissue
level)

4. The human Brain (neural pathways and synapses for short-term and long-term memory)

5. Culture (Oral and Written Recorded History) ~8,000 years ago; agriculture/animal
husbandry (Egyptian Hieroglyphics and The Rosetta Stone [in three different
languages])

IV. Five Branches of Philosophy

Philosophy seeks to answer at least three fundamental questions. In plain English, they are

Materialism: Self awareness and consciousness are emergent properties of the complexity of
brain architecture shared to some extent with other mammals and to a lesser extent with all
biological creatures.

Argument: After Billy was vaccinated he developed autism; therefore, the vaccine caused
his autism.

Problem: This does not provide any evidence that the vaccine was the cause. The
characteristics of autism may generally become noticeable at the age just following the typical
age children receive vaccinations.

Sophistry; marketing/advertising (manipulating the gullible into making you rich while you
sleep"... 1-800- ... Call Now!")

*** The Ra‰lian Movement teaches that life on Earth was scientifically created by a species
of extraterrestrials, whom they call the Elohim. Mon. Claude Vorilhon, a former French
journalist, is their spiritual leader, whom they call Rael. They are headquartered in Montreal,
Canada and are very interested in human cloning. They are primarily interested in maximizing
their parishioner's pleasure per unit of time.
_________________________________

Given the uncertainty in the historical record (and contradictory New Testament accounts),
scholars now believe that Jesus of Nazareth was not actually born on December 25th of the year
0 AD (Anno Domini), but sometime earlier between March and June in one of the years between
6, 5, or 4 BCE (Before the Common Era). In pagan traditions predating Christianity, the Winter
Solstice was a very important time for celebration -- in the hopes that the days would again get
longer (in the Northern Hemisphere) and the warmth of Spring would ultimately return. Thus,
many gods and goddesses were presumed to have been born on or around this time. For
example, the following births occurred in December (Julian Calendar): The Egyptian God Horus,
Mithras (the Unconquered Sun of Persia), Amaterasu (The Japanese Goddess of the Sun), Rhea
(who gave birth to Saturn, son of the Father of Time), Quetzalcoatl and Lucina ("Little Light"),
Lucia (Saint or Goddess of Light, who is honored from Italy to Sweden, crowned with candles to
carry us through the darkness), Sarasvati, the Hindu Goddess of Knowledge and the Queen of
Heaven. Do you see a pattern here? It would have been trivial to establish the birth of Jesus as
December 25th in the absence of an official birth certificate and thereby obviate the need for
more than one celebration at Yule-Tide among Christian practitioners.

C. Agnostics (Unsure of the existence of God; He/he may or may not exist, but I need
to hedge my bets on the grounds that there is insufficient evidence.);

D. Atheists (Sure that God doesn't exist) [modern atheists include, Richard Dawkins,
Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens {recently died of throat cancer, but didn't
change his position at the last moment}The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.]

Ref.: * His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York; Dec. 6, 2011; 208 pages, $16.32 on Amazon.com).
{Secular ethics means that you don't need religion to lead a happy and ethical life. But the
difference between ethics and religion is like the difference between tea and water. You clearly
need water to live, but if you have an ethics grounded in religion, it is more like tea, which
includes water, aromatic tea leaves, spices, sugar, and, in Tibet, a pinch of salt. Prayer, although
important, cannot match the achievements of modern science, including physics, cosmology,
biology, psychology, and neuroscience. At the genome level, the differences between different
races is less significant than the difference between different individuals, so all humans are as
one regardless of race. Buddhism has a history of adapting to changing times and cultures and
today, a new American hybrid of Buddhism is blossoming.}

Allow the body to be eaten by vultures, jackals, or other carrion scavengers;

Mummify (remove internal organs, including the brain through the nose, and wrap the body
with spices and gauze);

Cremation (burn the corpse on a funerary pyre with two coins covering the eyes to pay the
boatman, as you seek to cross the River Styx);

Bury in a coffin in a grave six-feet-under with a head-stone marker in a cemetery (reserved
real estate by consensus) or in a mausoleum [sarcophagus/crypt/inscribed stone ossuary box to
hold bones of the deceased] above ground or in a cave [catacombs]; bury at sea.
Morticians/undertakers perform miraculous improvements in the appearance of the decedent with
cosmetics even after an autopsy; they use formalin (formaldehyde) as an embalming fluid to
preserve the body for an open-casket funeral service that may require a week or more to
schedule, so the remains will be well preserved;

Donate the body to science for dissection by medical students in a course in human anatomy
(In Europe, dissection was once declared illegal, an invasion of a sacred body);
Donate/sell body parts to private companies (surgeons in training);
Plasticize (Gunther von Hagens, M.D., German Pathologist with a traveling show);
Cryonic suspension (in liquid nitrogen) [Alcor, Inc. of Scottsdale, AZ].

C. Worry in a Straight Line:
1. Identify what we already know [Google; Wikipedia; Old Encyclopedias {Britannica, Encarta},
Dictionaries (OED, Webster), Atlases, Thesaurus, CIA World Fact Book, Almanac, Book of
World Records] and how to exploit it (it is known, it's just that you personally don't know it)
2. Estimate what we need to know that we don't know yet (Former US Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld explained to us that there are "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns")
Of the former, figure out
(a) What is unknowable, in principle (and hopefully ignore it)
(b) What is, in fact, knowable; but in what period of time and at what cost (affordability)?
(c) Create a strategy, a plan, and a budget for learning the needed knowledge subject to the
specified time and financial constraints.

IX. Extinction of the Human Race

Are Homo sapiens on a slippery slope toward species extinction? And if we are, when might
this happen? Furthermore, if we had sufficient warning, would we be able to do anything about it
beforehand?

The Biblical "Four Horseman of the Apocalypse" are still alive-and-well (as they were
revealed in the Book of Revelation {war, pestilence, famine, and death}), but they are probably
not the surest path to the complete extinction of our species. Humans have overcome a wide
variety of repetitive catastrophic natural disasters over the last 200,000 years (when we first
evolved to became the dominant hominid/primate species on the planet). We have survived
earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, typhoons, tsunamis, volcanos, meteor showers,
sun-spot cycles, floods, droughts, ice ages, lighning-induced forest fires, variation in ocean
currents (El Nino, El Nina), plagues of locus, and a variety of pathogenic
microorganisms/parasites, including (in no special order) anthrax, bubonic plague (or the black
death [Yersinia Pestis]), Spanish Flu, bird (avian) flu, swine flu, small pox, measles (causing
shingles), mumps, German Measles, Pertusis (whooping cough), Scarlet Fever, Polio (infantile
paralysis), Hansen's Disease (leprosy), malaria, Ebola (hemorrhagic fever), syphilis, gonorrhea,
AIDS/HIV, HPV (venereal warts), Hepatitis A,B,C, rabies, trichinosis, yeast infections, fungus,
Giardia Lamblia (protazoan in feces), Trypanosoma cruzi (a flagellate protozoan that causes
Chagas Disease), Typhoid Fever, Amoebic Dysentery, Yellow Fever, Rickettsial Fever, sleeping
sickness, bed bugs, ticks (Lyme Disease), fleas, mites, lice, etc., but nothing has stopped us from
propagating ourselves for very long -- in recent centuries, only plague and flu have resulted in a
noticeable but temporary down-tick in our global population statistics that are otherwise
increasing exponentially now at seven billion and counting. Humans have continued to flourish
on every continent despite any sort of adversity that Nature has thrown our way, at least so far.

Yet there are a set of potential extinction events that we really need to worry about (20 of
them are cited below in approximately chronological order):

1. Accidental Nuclear Exchange (Yield >=100 MT [Mega Tons])

Given that both Russian and US missiles are still on hair-trigger alert (a Mutually
Assured Destruction [MAD] strategy left over from the days of the Cold War that ended quite
some time ago with the collapse of the USSR), multiple hydrogen bombs (# > 100) could result
in a "Nuclear Winter." Under this scenario, dust in the high atmosphere, could extinguish all
vegetation on the surface of the planet due to a block of sunlight for more than a decade. Deep
ocean species like tube worms fed by funnels of hot water containing sulfur may survive, but all
land mammals could be obliterated for lack of food (sunlight is on the critical path to plant
photosynthesis, which are eaten by herbivores, which are eaten by carnivores, which are eaten by
omnivores (like us) (as you rise up in the classical food chain/web).

Ref.: Watch the 90-minute documentary film "Count Down to Zero" (2010) which
contains the following quote by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Chief Scientist of the Manhattan
Project in New Mexico, at the time of the first test of the Trinity atomic bomb... "We knew the
world would not be the same. a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita...

Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,' Vishnu, the muti-armed Hindu God."

The documentary explains the precarious state of our modern nuclear arsenal with many
examples of accidents that were first classified "Top secret" before they became known to the
public.

The most likely immediate nuclear scenario, however, is of a small number of dirty
bombs (containing radioactive cobalt, cesium, etc.) exploded by terrorists within major cities.
This probably won't obliterate our species, but it would be a non-trivial set back to lose Hong
Kong, Tokyo, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, London, Toronto, Boston, New
York, Washington, D.C., Miami, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
San Diego, and Sydney all at the same time.

2. Biological Warfare

A single terrorist attack using a sophisticated form of (chemical or) biological warfare
(WMD's) - a weaponized viral or bacterial microorganism that spreads in air by sneezing and
kills infected people with ~100 percent fatality in approximately three days. (There is a
Hollywood movie scenario that suggests this event would be survivable see the film
Contagion.)

3. Cyber Warfare

A terrorist cyber-attack transforming all worldwide Internet-connected computers/servers
into "dead bricks" (These "blue screens of death" would be survivable.)

Over-population will lead to global conflict over increasingly scarce fresh water supplies,
assuming that sea-water desalination is not economically feasible in the time frame we would
need. (This unsustainability problem is survivable for the species, however; since the excess
population would suffer famine and die of starvation, but not everyone would die.)
Ref.: Prof. Stephen Emmott of Oxford University, UK"Ten Billion" (referring to the
number of humans soon to be on our planet)
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/18/countdown-to-ten-billion_(n_1684762.html

Species on Earth are becoming extinct at a rate 1,000x faster than the normal evolutionary
rate, as we consume our way through our planet's resources by clear cutting forests. Our air
mileage figures are the most shameful: By 1960, we had flown 100 billion miles; by 1980, we
had flown 1,000 billion miles; today, we jet 6,000 billion air miles per year. The resultant climate
change will leave us literally high and dry in a dystopia (recall the movie Blade Runner with a
one percent of the City of Los Angeles's wealthy citizens living behind a gated community and
the rest living in extreme poverty.

6. A Large Meteor Impacts the Earth

Even a potential large impact is survivable providing we detect it's presence and calculate
its ETA with a lead time of [10 - 20] weeks, allowing for a controlled deflection of the trajectory
(SciFi Movie = Meteor). (BTW, we should not try to blow-up the block of ice/rock into small
harmless pieces with a nuclear detonation in outer spaace; this could be foolishly
counterproductive by creating a shower of multiple concurrent impacts A gentle nudge of the
"big guy" would be sufficient for gravity to allow for a near miss, and we will have successfully
"dodged a bullet.")

7. Climate Change and/or Destruction of the Ozone Layer

Global warming due to elevated CO2 concentrations by burning wood/coal/oil/gasoline
for the last 100 years, and a resulting "green house" effect, assuming we don't convert the
atmosphere into a Venus-like green-house "heat trap." Sea levels rise from a few feet to a few
yards as all the ice in Antarctica slowly melts. (This problem is disruptive but survivable,
however, by using geo-engineering with space- based mirrors or chemical sequestering methods.)

The protective ozone layers over the North and South Poles modulate the amount of
dangerous radiation that the Sun regularly puts out to which we might be exposed if the upper
atmosphere ozone holes were to expand indefinitely.

Another possibility is the start of a new ice age in which the surface layer of all the world's
oceans would freeze solid. Although this is likewise not a welcome prospect, it is survivable.

As our solar system floats (or bobs) up and down above and below the plane of the Milky
Way (our Sun is located in one of the outer arms), the Earth moves in an broadly-curved
sinusoidal trajectory with respect to our disk of stars (with a period of ~62 million years) thereby
exposing us to variable amounts of radiation depending on whether we are above or below our
asymmetric plate (with North/South faces) at any particular time. This variation would be a
function of other active processes that are presumably going on within our Local Cluster as well
as the orientation of our galaxy in 3-D space while it is also moving away from the former center
of the universe (the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago), but subject to local turbulent gravitational
effects from near-by galaxies. The galactic disk takes about 200 million years to rotate once; its
center is assumed to contain a large black hole. The Earth may be exposed to a radiation shock
wave from the rotation of the galaxy in the intergalactic medium as it passes from below to above
and then blow again, and this may account for periodic global life-extinction events (punctuated
evolution) on the Earth. Synchronizing these cycles to find out which are causal is not easy. It is
clear that, if the rate of bobbing changed capriciously, this could result in a catastrophic
consequences for the human race.

9. Extinguishing the Geomagnetic Field that Shields the Earth from Solar Radiation

The Magnetic North/South Poles periodically swaps direction (flips with an oscillation
cycle of ~4,000 years). This is evidenced by ocean floor sampling revealing a stripped pattern of
directional iron compounds. During the time of the reversal, the Earth's protective magnetic field
might be annihilated (This problem is survivable if it takes place gradually enough or in a
magnetic quadrapole rather than simple-dipole manner.)

10. Lunar Detachment

The Moon escapes from the gravity field of the Earth, altering the normal tidal pattern in
our oceans Our Moon, Luna, with a dead core, is gradually drifting farther and farther away
from the Earth (already only one side faces us and the phases of the moon from "full" to "new"
are not wellsynchronized to the months of the year resulting in what is called a "blue moon.").
The Moon stabilizes the rotational speed of the Earth (giving us a 24-hour day, that at one time
was a lot shorter [~10 hours]) and therefore our terrestrial weather/climate. (Later on, the Moon
could spin back-in much closer and thus break up and turn into a collection of rocks like the rings
of Saturn, but that will be about a billion years from now, and the Earth is likely to be
uninhabitable by then anyway; so we'll have to enjoy this spectacle from a distance if we're still
around ourselves. Another theory says that the Moon will fly away into space if it escapes Earth's
gravity; by then all oceanic tides (neap tides, etc.) will be determined exclusively by the the
Sun's gravity, assuming there still are oceans). (This problem is survivable).

11. The Diameter of the Sun Expands on Its Way to Becoming a Red Dwarf

In 200 million years, our Sun will expand to include the orbit of Mercury in its natural
evolution as a star of its size (not sufficient for a supernova) that consumes all its hydrogen fuel
(having converted it to helium by fusion). Anyone still on Earth will fry, after the oceans
evaporate and then boil away. The sand (Earth's crust) will be sterilized and then take on the
texture of molten lava. Long before then, however, we should make a mandatory visit to
Europa, where temperatures will be more hospitable, there would be a watery ocean > 100 miles
deep, but, sadly, the atmosphere would not be breathable [likewise for Io, Callisto, and
Gannymede].) Nevertheless, we would get a good up-close view of Jupiter.

12. Imminent Galactic Collision

In about 400 million years, the Nebula-in-Andromeda is expected to collide with our own
Milky Way galaxy. Due to the large empty space between stars, there may not be mutual star
collisions and the two spinning wheels may pass through each other, but gravitational turbulence
may cause different stars to be pulled hither and yon. (This event is survivable, assuming that the
naked Earth is not cast off into deep space by a gravitational sling shot and we weren't able to
find a near-by star to hook up with at the proper distance.)

13. Rogue Stars

We are about to be "rained on" by stars that have been thrown our way by a smaller
galaxy that the Milky Way already collided with quite some time ago. This collision shot the
small galaxy's stars toward the far side of our galaxy, but gradually the gravitation of our galaxy
captured the stars and drew them back toward us. We may be located right where these stars are,
and they may be due to hit our solar system.

14. Rogue Black Holes

Black holes have been detected moving around in odd locations, so there's always the
chance one could drift into our vicinity from an unexpected direction, which could reduce our
warning, not that we could do anything about it other than watch it from somewhere else! There
are also rogue planets shooting around out there -- planets that have been torn loose from their
original stars and could come careening in from any direction. Fortunately, the odds of one of
these hitting us is low, and we wouldn't have the same action-at-a-distance threat that a black
hole (even a micro black hole) would.

15. Atmospheric Gas Composition

The relative concentration of nitrogen/oxygen/carbon-dioxide/argon/neon/xenon in our
atmosphere is in a delicate balance. Too much (or too little) oxygen could be horrific.

The 11-year sunspot cycle could be disrupted. Just one big solar flare (like a belch in the
liquid hydrogen as it bubbled up to the surface) might be very dangerous. Who knows what that
would entail for all the species on our planet?

17. Change in the Earth's Obliquity, Radial Distance to the Sun, or Orbital Eccentricity

The spinning of the Earth on its axis makes an angle with respect to the plane of the ecliptic
called its obliquity or "angle of declination." It could tilt beyond 22.45 degrees. There is also a
wobble or precession associated with the spinning (like a top) which explains why our current
North Star (Polaris) has changed over the centuries. An increased angle would make our Winter
and Summer seasons far more extreme. A flattening of the angle toward zero would eliminate the
seasons, making the Earth look more like Jupiter with large horizontal weather bands and long
lasting (centuries) cyclones. (Note: Magnetic North pole is not the same as Due-North due to the
presence of iron ore in a big lump and the dynamo effect of a rotating spheroid.) An increase in
our eccentricity would change the number of days per year from ~365 (an ellipse is not a circle ).
A change in the radial distance from the Sun ([91 - 94] million miles or ~8 light seconds) would
not only change the number of days per year but have other temperature effects depending on
whether it was an increase of decrease.. Milankovitch Cycles can be used to determine the
periodicity of ice ages by means of mathematical formulas.

18. Disruption of Techtonic Plates

An abrupt positive feedback loop in the internal temperature dynamics of the Earth's
crust, mantle, and liquid core could be catastrophic. Techtonic plates could be disrupted and all
the known continents could be swallowed up in a short time with no land to replace them
whatsoever! Remember Pangaea was a single supercontinent 300 million years ago (it had a
number of different predecessors before it, each with exotic names) that gave rise to today's
seven continents {North/South America, Asia, Europe Africa, Australia, and Antarctica}
separated by oceans that we know and love (these continents drift with respect to each other at
the same rate as our finger nails grow, so it's hard (without GPS) to track their motion precisely
(centimeters per year), but who is to say that this rate will remain constant, and it couldn't speed
up 100,000x abruptly).

19. Invasion by Aliens from Mars or Wherever

After an invasion by an intelligent but nasty species of aliens from outer space (like The
Borg of Star Trek) who mean to do us harm, "all bets are off." This scenario is rather fanciful.
Nevertheless, Dr. Stephen Hawking warned humanity that "we should not shout out when we're
walking in the jungle." Dr. Carl Sagan already did the equivalent of shouting with our
gratuitous Voyager disk. It instructs whomever finds it exactly where to locate us (SciFi Movies:
War of he Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Prometheus [July 2012]). (The SETI project is still listening for extraterrestrial signals, but
hasn't found anything so far, despite decades of scanning.)

20. The Big Rip

In about 100 billion years, according to our current cosmological dogma, our universe
will have continued to expand to the point that at first only the stars in the Milky Way will be
visible, making the night sky look pretty dark, and then all stars will be extinguished (so it's
really, really dark). If all local stars are extinguished then the terms "day" and "night" can no
longer be distinguished; finally, all molecules/atoms/protons/neutrons are annihilated (the "Big
Rip"), decomposing into bosons/quarks. Subsequently, the "strong force" becomes irreversibly
damaged, "All bets are off." "Exit stage left." through a "worm hole" to another more
hospitable universe within the ostensible "multiverse," assuming this is at all possible. Calling
all physicists... please rescue us from this pernicious scenario.

Conclusion for Section IX:

As far as our human species is concerned, we've moved a long way forward. Civilization
has progressed from the days of our hunter/gatherer ancestral tribes. Just a few thousand years
ago (2000 BCE), we concluded that there were only four elements {Earth, Fire, Air, and Water}
and only four body fluids that needed to be kept in balance for good health {blood, phlem, black
bile, and yellow bile}. {The words "sanguine" and "phlegmatic" in our current language are
derived from this false model of physiology.} Note that none of these so-called elements is in
reality an element based on our current understanding of chemistry (The Periodic Table of the
Elements). Water is a compound; earth (dirt, beach sand) is a mixture; air is a mixture; and fire
(combustion) is an artifact of rapid oxidation {just like rust is an artifact of slow iron oxidation}.
But, we can't rest on our laurels, amused by the foolishness of our ancestors; we still have a long
way to go to make sense of the world, even though the 11-dimensional Brane/String Theory of
Everything (ToE) that integrates gravity with quantum mechanics with the four forces and the
standard Boson/Quark model of particles is close at hand.

What is important is for us to understand how to reprogram (debug) the genetic code (the
DNA in our chromosomes contains 3.1 billion base pairs {A, G, T, and C}) without disrupting
the architecture of our human adult tissues. This is the next big challenge.

Here's an update from Dr. Gunther Kletetschka... Part of my research has to do with the
extinction of large mammals due to a comet/asteroid that landed in Alberta, CANADA 12,800
years ago. We published our finding this year and last year in PNAS [5-8]. I believe that we have
solid evidence that all mega mammals went extinct along with nearly all human beings.

Just because we've been the dominant species on the planet for the last 10K years or so,
given the advent of civilization, agriculture, written language, science and technology (the
Internet), why do we imagine that we have the right to be called the dominant (alpha) species,
and that "this was our destiny all along"? It might have been due to chance. And sure enough, as
we look at the data, it was due to chance.

About 99.9 percent of all species that ever appeared on Earth are now extinct. Except
perhaps for deep, dark ocean tube-worm locations with hot sulfur pouring out of deep cracks and
boiling the cold salt-water around them, the Earth has never been a Garden of Eden for anyone
with its volcanoes, tornadoes/cyclones, hurricanes/typhoons, forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis,
floods/droughts, and ice ages. Human stone age hunter/gatherers were no exception for the
majority of our time here on Earth (~200K years), and we ourselves (Homo sapiens) almost
became extinct several times in competition with other forms of life throughout our history. We
were never the superior, top-predator species compared with most carnivores, until we learned
how to breed dogs (domesticated wolves) to help us survive the dangers of becoming prey, ~50
KYA. Tool using and the ability to walk long distances (miles) and throw sharp spears at a
distance really made a big difference, especially when we used language to coordinate our
hunting expeditions in teams and teach the next generation of human progeny how to make stone
tools, sew clothing from skins, and build fires to cook meat and keep warm in Winter. Along the
way, we learned that death appears to be inevitable -- what we now call "The Human
Condition."

So where's the luck/randomness? There were at least five major catastrophic near-extinction
events in the last few hundred million years on our friendly Earth that helped shape the evolution
of Homo sapiens on this planet, ultimately giving us licence to take over the whole place (every
continent and even parts of the Moon). Here they are in chronological order:
1. "The Great Dying" (Toxic volcanoes split the single continental land mass [Pangea ] in half
with its green land-based vegetation (that raised the level of oxygen in the atmosphere) and either
cooked or froze everything around one island of land sitting above a single very-large ocean, 252
MYA [1].
2. The Dinosaur Extinction (including top predator T. Rex) 66 MYA secondary to a large
asteroid impact that cooked the global environment (except for a few mouse-type mammals
hiding in boroughs under ground) [2].
3. An ice age. Primates now live in trees or walk on two legs as needed. But temperatures got
uncomfortably cold [starting at ~120 KYA] and those primates North of the Congo River
suffered (Chimps and hominids like us that weren't aggressive didn't survive; warlike behavior
was needed, since resources became scarce). On the other hand, the bonobos South of the
Congo-barrier in Africa survived in a milder climate and their personality never needed to be so
aggressive as to go to war to survive, and this psychologically dark trait was not selected for as
adaptive [3].
4. The eruption of the Toba Volcano in Indonesia (70 KYA) left the global skies dark (without
sunlight) for nearly ten years, so the human population without food dwindled down to ~2,000
folk in Africa (at the hairy edge of extinction) [4]. The proof is that more than 99 percent of our
genomes are almost identical, which is a lot more than most other primate species, leading to the
conclusion that we migrated around the Earth from one mid-African starting point that consisted
of a relatively small tribe of "survivors." The illusion of profound phenotypic racial differences
(Caucasians, Blacks, Orientals, American Indians, etc.) is not so much in new gene networks but
in small SNP variations needed to adapt to the requirement for the right amount of Vitamin D
from sunlight and calibration of our mtDNA to maintain metabolic rates (we're warm-blooded
creatures with constant body temperatures, regardless of the external climate and different
weather patterns required different ATP/caloric maintenance) making our appearance to one
another superficially (cosmetically) different (skin color, hair texture, etc.), even though our
genomes tell the story of how we almost didn't make it at the time of this more recent
near-extinction event.
5. An asteroid that fell in Alberta, CANADA 12,800 years ago [5-8] killed all mega mammals
and most humans along with them.

So there you have it. We should count your blessings, not brag about your superiority, for
the next near-extinction event could be a full-extinction event and be just around the corner, So
we should get ready for one soon. And I don't mean plan an expedition to Mars to see if we can
terraform it to our purposes. I mean that we need to solve the "mortality problem," so we can live
long enough to figure out what to do with our precarious Earth environment, if it decides to
suddenly fail. Furthermore, our star, Sol, the sun, won't last forever either, but at least, for that,
we have a substantial grace period, as we discussed above.

Refs.:

1. The Permian Triassic (P/Tr) extinction event, informally termed the "Great Dying,"
forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as the
Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. This was the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with up
to 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming
extinct.

2. This event marked the end of the Cretaceous period and with it, the entire Mesozoic Era,
opening the Cenozoic Era, which continues today.

3. Ice Ages

4. The Toba Supereruption was a massive volcanic eruption that occurred [72K +/- 5 K] YA
at Mount Toba (Sumatra, INDONESIA). It is recognized as one of the Earth's largest known
eruptions. The related catastrophe hypothesis holds that this event caused a global volcanic
winter of [6 - - 10] years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode in Earth's climate.

If I were the Chancellor of my own university and could dictate what my students should
study to gain a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Gerontology with the aim of getting an M.D. or a
Ph.D. in the future as a graduate degree, here's what I would propose that they study on the way
to winning their Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine...

7. Psychology (1 year Senior):
Rational Thought/Cognitive Psychology (or modeling of the mind), Developmental Psychology
(Jean Piaget), Psychiatric Disorders (Sigmund Freud), Addiction, Memory encoding and
decoding at the molecular level, Theory of Agency (active animal predators or other humans
skilled at deception/duplicity/dissembling/lying/prevarication/cheating/stealing as a means to
exploit innocent others; Think: Pinnochio on his way to school approached by a cat and a fox with the
proposition that they all sing "Hi Diddle De De, an Actor's Life for Me" on they're way to a life
of luxury, when infact all the children would turn into donkeys for a life of exploitation by their
new owners. Our current gambling casinos serve an identical purpose for today's adults [Richard
Dawkins].)

13. Humanities (1 year Senior):
History of Science and Technology and the Scientific Method (Paradigm Shifts: Newton -->
Einstein), History of Medicine and Surgery (BTW, contrary to what one might think, this topic is
not taught in medical school where they teach you only what you need to know to do a residency
and get licensed, not the absurdly ludicrous mistakes of our pathetic predecessors).
Learn one foreign language from among {Chinese [Mandarin], Japanese, Korean, Russian,
German, Italian, French, or Spanish} as a second language, so you can read and speak it to a
native speaker.
Learn how to distinguish spoken accents (not taught in any formal school to my knowledge,
except in the Intelligence Community) from among: London (Cockney vs. Queen's), Irish,
Scottish, Australian, South African, Canadian, Bostonian, Queens New York, Southern, Texas,
Minnesota, etc. For extra credit, distinguish the native language of speakers of English from
Spain, Mexico, Cuba, France, Germany, Russia, China, etc. It took me three years to tell native
French speakers from Paris from those speakers who came from the South, like Marseilles. Dr.
Gregory House, M.D. is one of those rare individuals who can switch from his native British to
American English without detection!

Ref.: 1. Nine European scientists, who did a remarkable job of predicting the
future --
http://io9.com/5947687/nine-futurists-whose-centuries+old-predictions-were-ahead-of-their-time
s

It's difficult to cover all the above topics in a narrow technological school like MIT or
CalTech, and that's why I believe one first needs to go to a comprehensive university with a Law
School, a Business School, a Medical School, an Engineering School, a Science School, a
Humanities School, and a School of Theology. But even then, you won't get the full coverage of
a Renaissance Man (Woman) (think Leonardo da Vinci). That's why one will still need to do
considerable independent study. You need to read Scientific American every month
cover-to-cover and read at least one book a month for ten years. Furthermore, if you don't know
mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology at a significantly-professional level, it's pretentious
to try and argue against a true intellectual who has, in fact, paid their dues, just because it may be
intuitively pleasing to imagine that, by doing more of the same stuff that science is already doing,
we will achieve a "cure to aging in our lifetimes"; all we need to do is simply "throw money at
the problem" (even though that might help a lot in the short term). A simplistic approach may
not converge to a solution. (Think: "The War on Cancer," announced by then
President Nixon in the 1970's. Many scientists told him that it would be premature and went on
to tell him later, "I told you so.")